Left, Right, or Straight: Leg Analysis #9

Today, we will focus on a detailed analysis of leg 14-15 from the women's long course at 'Spring Spartacus' event in Hungary.

I find the route choice for leg 14-15 to be simple and unambiguous.

This perception is supported by the GPS tracks of the competitors. Interestingly, only one competitor from this class took the right-hand route out of all those who loaded their tracks on Livelox.

We cannot definitively attribute this deviation to the athlete's error. For many runners, these competitions were part of the training camp for the European Championships 2024. The athlete may have had different objectives than simply completing the course quickly. It's possible that on this leg, she was practicing a challenging technical skill, such as running along a slope.

However, based on this iformation, we can assess how effective the right-hand route was.

The leg is 1060 metres long, crossing massive landforms. Therefore, one of the first assessments is the positioning of the controls in terms of height.

We can observe that Control 15 is approximately at the same elevation as Control 14, positioned near the middle of the slope. Strategically, we have two options: either ascend directly from Control 14 and then descend to Control 15 (left route), or descend from Control 14 and then ascend (right route). The elevation gain for both routes will be roughly equivalent. However, the left route follows the road, while the right route traverses horizontally along the slope, resulting in a significantly slower pace

The right-hand route is also more difficult to follow.

Compared to the leader of this leg and overall cource Simona Aebersold, Pia Young Vik lost on right route 1.52.

However, the leader was noticeably faster than the others athletes in this class.

We took the averall second place Andrine Benjaminsen. Thus, Pia Young Vik lost to her 'direct competitors' is 48 seconds.

comparison with the second time on the leg of Rita Máramarosi (5th place overall): + 1.07

(I will provide further explanation about 'direct competitors' and its relation to navigation in Confident Orienteering Book 2 'Planning and Execution of Routes', which is slated for release, if all goes well, by the end of 2024.

In the meantime, you can purchase and study Confident Orienteering Book 1, which is about the principles on which my author's 'Сonfident Оrienteering' navigation approach is based)

We can also see that Pia's approach to Control 15 was not optimal. It could have resulted in a loss of 15-20 seconds less. So my prediction that the right route would lose at least 1 minute was not entirely accurate.